So far we’ve addressed the importance of providing the same functionality in the cloud as what is available on-premises, and why customers should be able to securely optimize traffic in a hybrid environment.

Today we’re going to discuss questions three and four from the list, and why these are important topics to bring up with current vendors before or during your cloud migration. Here we go:

Does the solution natively integrate with the public cloud fabric?

Can the solution auto-scale for performance and capacity?

One of the chief benefits of leveraging the cloud is its flexibility and scalability. By deploying workloads or applications in the cloud, infrastructure is virtually limitless because cloud vendors provide sophisticated auto-scaling capabilities that will essentially “spin-up” as much cloud capacity as needed, and then spin back down when it’s not. This means the days of over-purchasing infrastructure to handle burst requirements, is no longer a concern in the cloud.

Now, when customers add products like security to the basic cloud fabric — it’s equally important that those products are tightly integrated enough into the given public cloud infrastructure. This is to ensure that they can be auto-scaled as the customer’s cloud instance scales up and down. It doesn’t help to scale up cloud capacity to handle heavier workloads if they’re bottlenecked through a single security instance.

When we designed Barracuda’s cloud solutions, we were careful to understand how each cloud manages clustering and auto-scaling, and how to code the appropriate “hooks” so that our software would be just as elastic as the public cloud instances they’re protecting. This also means that the burden of provisioning and deploying those additional instances needs to fall to the cloud infrastructure so that customers aren’t responsible for additional set-up and deployment tasks. This needs to occur in seconds so that customers accessing the cloud never see any degradation in performance.

We hope these topics help you address the cloud readiness of your current vendor’s offerings because as you can see, there’s so much more to a cloud migration than just the price argument. Please tune back here in a couple days as we continue this series. In the meantime, here are a few resources and related posts the check out:

Rich Turner – Rich is a Product Marketing Manager with Barracuda. He is currently leading Public Cloud marketing (AWS and Azure) where Barracuda has become Microsoft's #1 ISV and our revenues are growing at 400+%. His Barracuda blog is here.

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.